Measuring voice readiness of local area networks

It is well known that company intranets are growing into ubiquitous communications media for everything. As a consequence, network traffic is notoriously dynamic, and unpredictable. In most scenarios, the data network requires tuning to achieve acceptable quality for voice integration. This paper introduces a performance measurement method based on widely used IP protocol elements, which allows measurement of network performance criteria to predict the voice transmission feasibility of a given local area network. The measurement does neither depend on special VoIP (Voice over IP) equipment, nor does it need network monitoring hardware. Rather it uses special payload samples to detect unloaded network conditions to receive reference values. These samples are followed by a typical VoIP application payload to obtain real-world measurement conditions. We successfully validate our method within a local area network and present all captured values that describe important aspects of voice quality.